I welcome the Minister to the House. I was contacted on 11 May 1993 by a group of 22 archaeologists and conservationists who were engaged in the excavation of this important early mediaeval site in Dublin. The site is situated at the rear of Christchurch Place with an entrance from Ross Road at the rear of the Iveagh flats complex. The site owners are Pearse Contracting and the site was previously owned by Dublin Corporation. In accordance with the planning conditions attached to the development the excavation and post-excavation work have been funded by the developers although they are not obliged to fund conservation for any archaeological remains uncovered in this work. To date Pearse Contracting appear to have behaved responsibly and sensitively and I welcome this.
The development of the site is partially completed with Jurys Hotel located at the front of the site and the multi-storey car park fronting onto Werburgh Street. The proposed development on the Ross Road portion of the site is an apartment bloc with an access road to the rear of the car park. This will require the back-filling of the site so that the tower and city wall will be covered. The access road will cover part of the site and it is intended that the remains of the tower wall would be enclosed in wire mesh and the roadway built above leaving the tower outlined in tarmac. Thus it will be buried for the foreseeable future. Although this will not physically destroy the structures it will mean they will no longer be accessible to the public and future generations.
I cannot over-emphasise the importance of this discovery. What is involved is the uncovering of an impressive portion of the pre-Norman Hiberno-Norse town wall and a 13th century mural tower thought to be Geneval's tower. The walls of this tower are five metres high and it is the first structure of its kind to be discovered. The town wall is 16 metres long and five metres high.
I visited the site and was heartened to see the city manager, Frank Feely, and the Lord Mayor, Alderman Gay Mitchell, making a detailed and sympathetic tour of the area. I understand that members of Dublin City Council have also taken the opportunity to visit the site and Senator Doyle has taken a particular interest in the matter. I have visited many archaeological sites throughout the world. Many of them, although no doubt fascinating to the tutored eye of the expert, are to the uninitiated merely insignificant lumps and outlines in the ground. This development is particularly exciting because of its immediate visual impact which brings the layman directly into contact with the reality of the built environment of our predecessors up to 1,000 years ago.
We have a tragic history in this city of ignoring and destroying important elements of our cultural heritage. One has only to look at the Wood Quay debacle, the destruction of Georgian Dublin or the devastation of the quays which was, regrettably, within the last few weeks, compounded by the demolition of Essex Quay by a body charged with preservation, the Temple Bar Property Company Ltd. The folly of the destruction of Wood Quay — which was so seriously resented by the citizens of Dublin that 20,000 of them marched in the streets to oppose it — was forcibly brought home to me when I visited the city of York some years ago to address a conference of conservation officers. The Viking site at Wood Quay was the largest and most important site of its kind in Europe. It was 19 times the size of the parallel site at York. It is now lost forever while the much smaller site at York has become an international example of how such discoveries can be protected to the advantage of the cultural and financial wellbeing of the communities sensible enough to preserve and develop them appropriately.
The discovery at Christchurch Place is an unusual second chance to pursue a positive policy and one which, I hope, will be exploited by the authorities. I have no doubt that, despite what may appear to be an initially significant cost, such a development will unquestionably more than pay for itself. It is important that the developers should not suffer any financial ill effect as a result of their sensitive approach. The initial phase of the developers' plans was that the site should be backfilled any time after Friday 14 May at which time no further archaeological access could be permitted. I am glad that this situation has now changed, and that Pearse Construction are in the process of commissioning a feasibility study on the possibility of preserving the site.
A meeting of Dublin City Council was held on 18 May last. This was a full council meeting which passed a motion proposing that a feasibility study should be carried out within six weeks. Pearse Construction has agreed not to backfill the site during this period. Full costing and all options will be explored by this study, which will be carried out by the developer's architects, Burke Kennedy Doyle. However, no independent study has been made available. Councillors, however, were unanimous in their enthusiasm for the preservation of the site and its presentation to the public. I welcome this positive approach, but in addition, the Office of Public Works should commission an independent feasibility study.
The situation has revealed a number of difficulties which may well recur, not only in Dublin but throughout the country, to which I am sure the Minister will direct his attention. First, the planning authorities and the Office of Public Works lack a coherent policy with regard to medieval remains found in the city. Can this be allowed to continue? A clear policy and legislation are required to prevent repetition of the situation. There is also in this case a problem with regard to the legality of the situation since planning permission had already been granted. The developers may naturally be unwilling either to sell the site or to change their plans. Financial compensation or incentives are necessary if plans must be changed. The position of the Office of Public Works is itself unclear, because of the difficulty of declaring the site a national monument, as that would only be possible if the Office of Public Works purchased the site.
At the time of my last briefing from those directly concerned, the only Office of Public Works' suggestion which had emerged was that preservation would cost £1 million. This naked assertion was not supported by any documentation in the form of professional plans or proper costing. At that time at least, no independent architects had been given an opportunity to redraw and cost new plans incorporating the medieval remains. I hope the Minister has some information suggesting that this situation will now be changed, and that a full independent survey will be conducted. This is a case in which, as it is clear funding is necessary, it should be made available either through the national lottery or an EC environmental grant. Moreover, as I indicated, appropriate compensation should be made available to the developer.
There have been successful projects of a similar nature elsewhere, in Ireland and in Europe. The Eyre Square shopping centre in Galway is a good example of the incorporation of archaeological remains. The surviving city wall of Galway, when incorporated into a shopping centre, acted as a selling point for shop units and a magnet for business investment. The preservation and incorporation of the city wall ultimately involved a small cost when expressed in terms of overall development expenditure. The Dublin Castle restoration project has successfully incorporated archaeological remains as a small percentage of the overall cost of the project, and now constitute a significant tourist attraction. In the British cities of York, Exeter, Bath and London, to mention but a few, archaeological remains are utilised as a tourist attraction.
Many other European cities have experienced no difficulty in combining preservation with building development. While visiting friends in Jerusalem, I was taken to see the Roman city of Jerash. I was very impressed with what I saw there and said so to the Jordanian guide. He told me that while Jerash was not important to his people as part of their cultural heritage, it has been preserved because of the important role it plays in attracting tourism. I wish I could have bottled the guide and poured him out as a libation at the feet of Dublin City Council. I am glad that Dublin City Council has learned from the mistakes of the past, and that we have the opportunity to do something now.
The Synod Hall in Christchurch has been transformed into a welcome and excellently designed reconstruction of the experiences of Dublin through the ages. It would be ironic indeed if the reality, the actual remains of Dublin, right next door, were to be obliterated instead of being developed as a complementary part of a significant cultural tourism complex right in the heart of our capital city.
